All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Earlier this year, Love Is Blind star Alexa Lemieux posted a TikTok announcing her pregnancy, followed by another video revealing her method for conceiving: The secret of her success was Mucinex. The video currently has more than a million views. As it turns out, the method of using guaifenesin (the primary ingredient in Mucinex and Robitussin) as a fertility aid is not such a secret. For a few decades, it’s been muttered about in mom circles, and even suggested by some doctors, as a hack for those struggling to get pregnant. Type Mucinex into the TikTok search bar, and fertility is the first thing that comes up. My son is a mucinex baby; We tried for 3 years and had 2 miscarriages. I used mucinex the same way you did and BOOM pregnant 🤪 / My Mucinex baby is now 4; I went 15 years without getting pregnant. / I also have PCOS, I got sick, took Mucinex, got a surprise baby who’s almost 2 now lol / My daughter is a Mucinex baby after 12 years of trying!! I tell everyone now!!
The theory behind the Mucinex method is about cervical mucus. Something that first entered the conception conversation back in the 1950s when Masters and Johnson were taking a scientific approach to understanding human sexuality. “They noted that sperm needs to go through a process of getting ready to penetrate an egg called capacitation, and that cervical mucus plays a big role,” says Neel Shah, MD, an ob-gyn, assistant professor of reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, and chief medical officer of Maven Clinics, a virtual clinic for women’s and family health. “A big part of trying to figure out how to get people pregnant was this fascination with cervical mucus.”
One of the notions that has come out of the conversations around the topic is that the viscosity of cervical mucus may play a role in one’s ability to get pregnant. “Guaifenesin, what’s in Robitussin and Mucinex, thins mucus everywhere, so if it works when you have a head cold, it could work in theory at thinning cervical mucus,” says Shah. The idea: Mucinex thins mucus in the cervix, sperm travels through more easily to fertilize the egg. Birth control, by contrast, works by thickening it. “The idea of a thick mucus blocking sperm does make intuitive sense, and Mucinex here would represent a simple, over-the-counter solution,” says S. Zev Williams, MD, chief of the division of reproductive endocrinology at Columbia University’s Fertility Center. But, he adds, the problem is that this presumes that the cause for infertility is too-thick mucus and also that Mucinex is helping it. Only one small study, published in 1982, examined the connection between guaifenesin and cervical mucus (patients took it from the fifth day of their cycle until ovulation), and though it did show an improvement in sperm survival, doctors agree that the experiment was flawed. Williams points out that there were no randomized control groups in the study (meaning there was no one taking a placebo, the hallmark of a reputable study), that it hasn’t been replicated, and that it wasn’t conducted on a generalizable population (rather on a specifically selected group shown to have no motile sperm). “We can’t say for sure that Mucinex caused the improved fertility,” says Karen Tang, MD, a gynecologic surgeon in Pennsylvania and author of It’s Not Hysteria, of the study. But while doctors are very cautious to say that there is no evidence-based data to say that Mucinex works, Tang allows that the potential is there: “In my opinion, there probably is some sort of effect,” she adds.
For those who are struggling to conceive, the notion of “probably” may be enough. Shah traced the more recent buzz around the Mucinex method back to a TikTok user who, during the pandemic, took it to treat her COVID-19 symptoms and ended up getting pregnant, which she attributed to the drug; afterward there was a significant spike in Google searches for it. More and more anecdotal stories about Mucinex babies have followed on TikTok. “There are a lot of people trying to validate or affirm their experiences, and there’s no counterfactual when you take Mucinex: You take it, you get pregnant, and you think that’s what worked,” says Shah. And for those struggling, adds Tang, seeing a public figure (like Lemieux) saying confidently that it made a difference makes it tempting to want to try. Particularly if they live in an area where access to health-care providers is limited. Using Google Analytics, Shah and his team found that there were far more Mucinex searches in the parts of the country that are maternity deserts, meaning there is a lack of women’s health and fertility clinicians. “There are a lot of people who need help and aren’t getting it, so they’re turning to TikTok and resorting to alchemy,” says Shah.
Many people who are trying to conceive, says Asima Ahmad, MD, a reproductive endocrinologist in Chicago and cofounder and CMO of Carrot Fertility, simply want to know what they can do from the comfort of their home. But what she sees among her patients is that oftentimes there are underlying issues that are impeding their fertility that can only be sussed out by a doctor (and that Mucinex can’t address). Some of these include that the man has no sperm, or that the woman’s fallopian tubes are blocked or she is not ovulating regularly. For the latter, there are oft-prescribed drugs like Clomid and Letrozole (both are frequently name-checked by TikTok users as part of their fertility regimen), which are designed to induce ovulation. Clomid, a selective estrogen receptor modulator, and Letrozole, an aromatase inhibitor, both work by signaling FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) in the brain to make more eggs, says Ahmad. “When people are not ovulating regularly, these drugs can be a great way to get them to release that egg, because if there’s no egg, you can put millions of sperm inside the uterus but there’s nothing to fertilize,” she says. However, she points out that both drugs come with side effects like a thinning of the uterine lining, headaches, or a feeling like you’re in menopause. Ahmad adds that these drugs still require an initial assessment. “You could give these medications to ovulate, but if the tubes are blocked or the man has no sperm, they still won’t work,” she adds. “Sometimes people will go online or to TikTok to find these quick fixes, and then months will pass and they don’t do the crucial thing of figuring out what’s actually going on before turning to fixes like this.”
There has also simply been less scientific inquiry dedicated to other methods of conception since the emergence of IVF in 1978. “It’s emblematic of how under-supported women’s health research is and how we actually don’t know enough about how people can become pregnant,” says Shah. Ahmad adds that the majority of patients who come into her Chicago clinic don’t even know how to time ovulation or that you don’t have just one day to conceive. Besides the supply-demand mismatch between fertility doctors and potential patients, IVF is invasive and can be financially out of reach. The procedure is costly and it’s not covered through Medicaid, which supports half of the reproductive people in this country. This year, despite the fact that 2% of babies born in the US are from assisted reproductive technologies, IVF has also increasingly come under fire as part of the debate around reproductive rights, putting access to it even more at risk.
There are no studies or numbers to support Mucinex’s off-label usage and no standardized approach to dosing when taken for fertility purposes (though you can find TikTok users doling out a protocol from their kitchen counters), but according to doctors, there’s also no harm to using it while pregnant, beyond the traditional side effects for either the women or the potential fetus.
“Our bottom line is that we don’t think it’s harmful, but I just can’t tell anyone that there’s any great benefit to using it,” says Harry J. Lieman, MD, an ob-gyn and medical director of Montefiore’s Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Health. Expectations around its efficacy just need to be kept in check—something that can be hard to do when everybody on social media is praising a technique. There are so many question marks around methods for getting pregnant and fertility aids, and Mucinex is simply another one: The evidence is poor that it helps, but it also doesn’t hurt. And for some who are eager to conceive, the anecdotal assurance may be enough. Says Tang: “I actually got pregnant the month I was using Mucinex.”
